Third Sunday before Lent (CoE Year B)
8th February 2009 6:00 p.m. Healing Eucharist
Homily delivered at St. John’s Cathedral, Hong Kong
Readings: Mark 1:29-39; 2 Corinthians 4:6-5:5
Saint Paul Writing his Epistles (1620), oil, Valentin de Boulogne (ca 1594-1632) or Nicolas Tournier (1590-1638),
Blaffer Foundation Collection, Houston, TX.
St. Paul in 2 Corinthians says that despite all sorts of horrors, disappointments, and difficulties, “we do not lose heart.” He says the light of the gospel is a treasure kept in pottery jars, easily broken, and says that our lives are those jars. He is no rosy-lensed optimist: he details many of the disappointments and trials he himself had experienced over the years. Yet, he says, “we do not lose heart.”
I was raised in a religious community that taught that God blessed the righteous, punished the wicked, and heard and answered the prayers of the righteous. My wife and I had a major trial in our faith just after we were married while we were still in college and just starting our own family. We had become friends with a young couple that went to Church with us. They were good people. After several years of unsuccessful efforts, they were able to get pregnant and had a beautiful little baby boy. After a month or so, though, it became apparent that sometime was wrong. He had been born with a genetic defect: the upper layers of his skin were not fully connected with the deeper layers. If you touched him slightly on the arm, it quickly would turn into a large blister, would easily burst and become infected. There was little that the doctors could do. Despite two months in intensive care, the baby’s body was covered with what essentially were second-degree burns. He was held suspended in a light net to prevent further damage from the bed. His parents were not allowed to touch him, so they could not even comfort him as he screamed his little life out in agony. During the ordeal, we prayed. Our friends prayed. The Church elders prayed and anointed the baby with healing oil, carefully, on the inch or so of sound skin on the side of his head. The whole community prayed. And the baby suffered and slowly died.
It is not the only time in my life when I wished that the world were as simple as I had been taught in Sunday School: my wife’s mother’s cancer, my father’s Alzheimer’s disease.
Yet I have also seen prayers answered in wonderful and miraculous ways, sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually: a deadly disease stopped in its tracks and healed, broken relationships mended and strengthened, mental illness managed.
The gospel stories of Jesus healing the sick—like those in tonight’s gospel reading from Mark—tell us that the ultimate purpose of God does not include disease, suffering, and death. Jesus’ ministry of announcing the in-breaking of the reign of God focused in large part in healing physical and mental suffering. This tells us that God doesn’t like horror and disappointment for his creatures any more than we do.
But how do we make sense of this?
Perhaps we cannot, but still are called to pray.
Archibishop Rowan Williams (Photo Eleanor Bentall)The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, talks about this in his book Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville / London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). I found what he has to say on this subject very helpful. It coheres with my experience both of prayers answered and prayers seemingly rejected.
Instead of giving you my own thoughts tonight, I thought I would follow a time-honored Anglican tradition of reading you a homily prepared by one of my betters. Here is what Rowan says:
“Aren’t Christians supposed to believe in miracles? Doesn’t the Bible give us a clear picture of a God who can impose his will on creation when it suits him? And if the Bible is right, then surely there is justification for the agonized cry that sometimes goes up, ‘Why does God intervene there and not here? Why are some prayers apparently answered and some not?’ I remember a vivid example from years back, when someone who had been involved in a very upbeat and confident charismatic prayer group asked why God should be thanked for finding parking spaces for members of the prayer group when he couldn’t be bothered to sort out the conflict in Northern Ireland. It’s a very good question indeed. I we are to answer it all, we’ll need to [remember the different ideas there are about the almightiness of God, and what faith in God means.]” (pp. 43-44)
“[What do we Christians mean when we talk about ‘God almighty’?] It has always been tempting to think of it in terms of what we would like so as to overcome our limitations—the ability to get whatever we desire, to resolve our own and everyone’s difficulties by a flick of the wrist. . . . If ‘I believe in God the Father almighty’ means ‘I believe that there is somewhere an unlimited power that can choose and perform anything it likes, and I need to be on the right side of it,’ that doesn’t sound as though it had much to do with trust; an almighty power like that, a huge arbitrary will, would be unsettling indeed.” (p. 15)
“The word translated ‘almighty’ in fact in the Greek [pantokrator] means ‘ruler of everything’ or even something like ‘holder of everything’; and this suggests a slightly different approach. It means that there is nowhere God is absent, powerless, or irrelevant; no situation in the universe in the face of which God is at a loss. Which is much the same as saying that there is no situation in which God is not to be relied upon. The freedom of his love . . . implies that his love never exhausts it resources, whatever happens in the universe in general or in my life in particular. . . . [W]e can get the idea of the ‘almightiness’ a bit wrong by thinking of it in terms of a great wish-fulfilment fantasy instead of seeing it as a way of saying that God always has the capacity to do something fresh and different, to bring something new out of a situation—because nothing outside of himself can finally frustrate his longing. So almightiness in this sense becomes another reason for trust.” (p. 16)
“What the Bible puts before us is not a record of a God who is always triumphantly getting his way by doing miracles . . . , but a God who gets his way by patiently struggling to make himself clear to human beings, to make his love real to them, especially when they seem not to want to know or to want to avoid him and retreat into their own fantasies about him. And typically, the Bible sometimes does this by a very bold method—by telling a certain kind of story from the human point of view, as if God needed to be persuaded to be faithful to his people. Someone like Abraham or Moses, someone who has good reason to know something about what God is really like, is faced with a crisis. Things are going badly; surely God is going to give up and blast people into oblivion. So Abraham and Moses argue with God until they have persuaded him to be merciful. These writers knew exactly what they were doing. They didn’t believe in a bad-tempered, capricious God who needed to be calmed down by sensible human beings. They knew that the most vivid way of expressing what they understood about God was to show Abraham and Moses appealing to the deepest and most true thing about God as they pray to him.” (p. 17)
“I have been trying to suggest the picture of a God whose almighty power is more of a steady swell of loving presence, always there at work in the centre of everything that is, opening the door to a future even when we can see no hope. So hoe might that apply to the question of miracles? Well, one thing that tells us is that we can’t be doing with the sort of notion of miracles that some seem to have, as if God hearing our prayers were like someone receiving applications. He ticks some and puts a cross on others and hands the forms back for action by some angelic civil service. There is a hint of a slightly more sensible approach in an idea put forward by St. Augustine in the fifth century—that miracles were really just natural processes speeded up a bit, ‘fast-forwarded’. This may be a bit too simple; but Augustine had got hold of something that many thinkers of the Middle Ages followed through in different ways. If God’s action is always at work around us, if it’s always ‘on hand’, so to speak, we shouldn’t be thinking of God’s action and the processes of the world as two opposing sorts of thing, jostling for space. But what if there were times when certain bits of the world’s processes came together in such a way that the whole cluster of happenings became a bit more open to God’s final purposes? What if the world were sometimes a bit more ‘transparent’ to the underlying act of God?” (pp. 44-45)
“God is always at work, but that work is not always visible. God is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of his final purpose and sometimes they resist. But if certain things came together in the world at this or that moment, the ‘flow’ would be easier and more direct. Perhaps a really intense prayer or a really holy life can open the world up that bit more to God’s purpose so that unexpected things happen. We’re never going to have a complete picture on how that works, because we don’t have God’s perspective on it all. But we can say that there are some things we can think, say or do that seem to give God that extra ‘freedom of manoeuvre’ in our universe. And whether we fully understand what’s going on or not, we know that it’s incumbent on us to do what we can to let this happen. We pray, we act in ways that have some chance of shaping a situation so that God can come more directly in. It isn’t a process we can manipulate; miracles aren’t magic, and we could never have a comprehensive manual of techniques for securing what we pray for. It would be very comforting if we knew the formula for success, but we don’t. All we know is that we are called to pray, to trust and to live with integrity before God (to live ‘holy’ lives) in such a way as to leave the door open, to let things come together so that love can come through.” (p. 45)
This faith described by the Archbishop of Canterbury, this trust in God who is ever there, and ever loving, sustains us and keeps us from “losing heart.”
Teilhard de Chardin
Let me close with a prayer that the great Jesuit anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin wrote at the onset of the illness that would eventually kill him:When the signs of age begin to mark my body
(and still more when they touch my mind);
when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off
strikes from without or is born within me;
when the painful moment comes
in which I suddenly awaken
to the fact that I am ill or growing old;
and above all at that last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself
and am absolutely passive within the hands
of the great unknown forces that have formed me;
in all those dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is you
(provided only my faith is strong enough)
who are painfully parting the fibres of my being
in order to penetrate to the very marrow
of my substance and bear me away within yourself.
In the name of God, Amen.
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